


Peer Review

by spilled_notes



Category: Holby City
Genre: (kind of - for bernie anyway), Berena Appreciation Week, F/F, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-19
Updated: 2017-07-19
Packaged: 2018-12-04 06:45:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11549694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spilled_notes/pseuds/spilled_notes
Summary: They both know each other's names long before they meet, both make use of the other's work in the course of their own. Both wish they could meet, to ask advice or to offer thanks.





	Peer Review

 

AAU is messy and chaotic and Serena doesn’t like it one bit – but since when has she ever backed down from a challenge? When it becomes clear that her move down here is permanent, she does her research. She’s going to do everything she can to be the best, to make AAU the best, and that starts with spending her days off reading everything she can get her hands on. She builds up quite a collection of articles and reports, statistics and best practice guidelines, populates her new office shelves with files and printouts on running an acute admissions unit and carrying out trauma surgery. The name B Wolfe crops up a few times, authoring and co-authoring articles on both surgical techniques and efficient triaging in trauma settings; but then so do other names – Hickman, Tobin, Scheyer, Moritz.

And then she finds a piece profiling high ranking women in the armed forces, wonders why it came up in her Google search because there’s nothing about medicine here. She’s about to close it but her finger slips on the mouse wheel and the page scrolls down. The last segment is on Captain Berenice Wolfe, trauma surgeon with the RAMC, currently on tour in Afghanistan, stationed at Camp Bastion. The name sparks a memory and Serena opens a new window, carries out a new search, connects B Wolfe to Berenice Wolfe, article author to army surgeon. She returns to the profile piece and reads to the end, can’t help but be impressed by this woman, by all she’s achieved, by the miracles she manages to work on a daily basis. By the fact that she’s been doing so for years, that she’s still there despite all she must have seen. There’s a photo of her too, in dress uniform with medals on her chest and a proud smile on her face. Serena wonders what she usually looks like, in the middle of surgery, the middle of a war, the middle of a desert. Thinks of Captain Wolfe often as she wages her own battle to transform AAU into an efficient ward, as she brushes up on surgical skills she hasn’t had the call to use in quite some time.

She thinks of her again, several years later, when she starts fighting for better trauma facilities, and wonders where she is, if she’s in the country or in another war zone. If she could be persuaded to cast her eye over Serena’s proposal and offer her considerable expertise in exchange for a bottle or two of her choice.

*

At the very moment Serena’s eyes fall on her photograph, four and a half hours ahead, Bernie folds herself into a chair in the doctors’ room and casts about for something to occupy her in the interminable stretch between surgeries. There’s a collection of papers, books and journals on the table beside her, left by her colleagues. She’s already read most of them, but on top is a new addition: the most recent issue of the Journal of Vascular Surgery.

 _Better than nothing_ , she thinks with a sigh, and starts to flick through. She soon becomes engrossed in an article on an alternative technique for repairing damage to the superficial femoral artery, races to the end and then goes back to read it more carefully and take in the technical details of the procedure. It looks promising and she decides to give it a go on the next appropriate case – which happens to come in just a few hours later. She’s pleasantly surprised when it proves to be more effective than what she would usually have done, and when her team asks where she got the idea she tells them to look at the Campbell paper in the journal.

From then on it’s Bernie’s first choice. ‘Praise be to Ms Campbell,’ becomes a not uncommon refrain in theatre, complete with glinting eyes and teasing voices. One of the orthopods sings ‘Puppy Love’ at her across a near-shattered body, spurring the rest of the team to join in in a horrendously out of tune chorus that makes her blush. But it saves more patients than she can count, including some she knows she’d probably have lost otherwise, which is worth all the jibes in the world.

Bernie wonders if she should send Serena Campbell a card on their behalf, wonders how this NHS consultant used to paperwork and guidelines, budget constraints and sterile theatres, would feel knowing her rarely required technique is being used on a daily basis in the bloodiest hospital in the world. Wonders if she’ll ever find out just how many limbs and lives she’s saved, how she’s served Queen and Country without even realising it, how very grateful Bernie is to her for helping her to do her absolute best by the young men and women who land up on her operating table.


End file.
